Tag: landscape

So often, permission to create is denied to us through a variety of societal restraints as well as self imposed restrictions of judgements and insecurities. To create is a right you are born to fulfill. And what better way to begin creating than in an unlined journal. Write your thoughts and add your sketches. You deserve the right to find your voice.

‘Chagall created this piece for the opera “Carmen” by George Bizet upon its opening at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The print is a small detail from a preliminary painting of Chagall’s much larger “The Triumph of Music”, which now hangs at the Metropolitan Opera.’

Marc Zakharovich Chagall (/ʃəˈɡɑːl/ shə-gahl, 6 July [O.S. 24 June] 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Russian-French artist. An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in virtually every artistic format, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints.

Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as “the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century” (though Chagall saw his work as “not the dream of one people but of all humanity”). According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be “the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists”. For decades, he “had also been respected as the world’s preeminent Jewish artist”. Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra.

Before World War I, he traveled between St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent the wartime years in Soviet Belarus, becoming one of the country’s most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922.

He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism’s “golden age” in Paris, where “he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism.” Yet throughout these phases of his style “he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk.”

“When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.”

Ocean Park on a hot California morning, the sun already beating down, sprinklers playing across fresh lawns, white buildings rising above parched boulevards that stretch away to the cool waters of Santa Monica bay. I’ve never seen it. Yet it has entered my senses forever because of Richard Diebenkorn.

The abstract paintings of this 20th-century master used to be everywhere, in the form of posters. Luminous overlays of soft, bleached colours balanced on underlying grids that conjured the built-up land against the fathomless Pacific, his Ocean Park paintings were so popular in the 1990s they attracted snobbery.

Abstract art for people who don’t like abstract art, was a common jibe; too easy on the eye, too neat and tidy, was another. When an Ocean Park poster appeared in one of the houses in the Channel 4 soap Brookside, I remember hearing his work compared to downmarket decor.

Perhaps this is one reason why Diebenkorn (1922-93) has been stinted in Britain. It has been so long since the last show – at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1991 – that a generation may never have seen his work. Not the least joy of the Royal Academy’s exhibition is the revelation of scale: the Ocean Park paintings may be amazingly big – nine or 10 square metres – or surprisingly small. Some are painted on cigar box lids.

But more remarkable for British viewers must be the chance to see Diebenkorn’s art evolving over a whole lifetime, from Albuquerque, New Mexico where he studied, to Urbana, Illinois where he taught, Berkeley, California where he lived until 1966, and then Santa Monica and the hundreds of works in the Ocean Parkseries.

The early abstracts are dense, rich and beautiful – colour and form fitting ruggedly together like outlandish rockeries. Invoking the hot light and open atmosphere of Berkeley in particular, and the wild, red stoniness of Albuquerque, so familiar now from Breaking Bad, they seem to be all about how the eye gets into the terrain, how it sees its way around tall trees, avenues, parks, mountain ranges, buildings and sky. It is no surprise that Diebenkorn was a lifelong student of Cézanne.

It’s as if something figurative had cropped up in a landscape seen from within, but also from high above

Sometimes the early works appear to pivot around a particular form – something like a handprint, a sign or an arrow. These remain mysterious, balancing the arrangements of colour around them. It’s as if something figurative had cropped up in a landscape seen from within, but also from high above; a human detail in the wide south-western landscapes the painter saw from the air while flying back and forth in the 50s between California and New Mexico.

Just as Diebenkorn was finding fame with these intricate yet craggy paintings that hold their marvellous colours – cobalt, forest green, flamingo pink – like the evening sky in the branches of a tree, he suddenly changed tune. Like his near contemporary Philip Guston, he gave up abstraction and turned to the figurative.

This show is perfectly arranged so that you can see this coming almost from the start because the first gallery has sightlines into the second. A doorway frames a terrific painting of a long California street, heavily shadowed by houses in the heat, that spools away into the wild blue yonder. It still has a planar aspect – and some of the real buildings were apparently eliminated to get that patchwork of lawn and field from the early abstracts – but now there are strong hints of Edward Hopper.

A portrait of a pair of scissors, heavy and old yet still full of iron purpose; a man sitting shirtless and pensive in the dusk; the parched sidewalks of Berkeley – Diebenkorn pays open homage not just to Hopper and Cézanne but now Matisse. He paints his wife, his neighbourhood, the humble objects of his house and studio with a tough, terse brush but a seductive love of the subjects as well as the paint itself.

The burning blue of a Bay Area sky held in balance with the softer greens and blues of the land and sea below are pinned together with the succinct black drawing, so delicate and yet structural, that you see throughout his career. It keeps a rigour to these paintings that might so easily spill over into swoony light and heat. But just as Diebenkorn was becoming the best known of the Bay Area figurative artists, he did the opposite of Guston, turning once more to abstraction.

On a trip to Russia, Diebenkorn had seen Matisse’s great and strange French Window at Collioure, with its haunting planes of darkness and light, and the memory stayed with him. There is a genetic link from the Matisse to everything you see in the last rooms of show: these rectilinear paintings, so gorgeous and yet serious, so hard-won, showing what he called the ‘tension beneath the calm’.

Of course the Ocean Park paintings have beauty and balance as their uppermost characteristics. The California blues are all there – cobalt, aqua, sky, cerulean, the faded jade and turquoise of boatyards, beaches and outdoor pools. And the architectural structure below is so elegant in its measured thinking, in its geometry and even its joinery.

But are they expressive of whole landscapes, could they be evocations of someone’s sprinklered garden with its sparkling pool? How does the atmosphere enter in? The paintings are stranger than expected, and this paradise is not without shadows – sometimes a grey pall, or a funereal black border edging into the frame.

The sense of endeavour, of tension, scrutiny and indecision changes every time

In fact the Ocean Park series that has given so many people such pleasure arrives out of hesitation, correction, uncertainty, further attempts, frequent cancellations. How can one tell? Diebenkorn leaves the workings on show. The veils of colour that settle on the painting like a misty haar lie over many trials and second thoughts. The paintings look light, bright, uplifting, slim; but this only comes after long and patient thinking.

This is what connects late with early; all of these paintings are bent on seeing and depicting the same thing – cities and landscapes – in new ways. The elements may be the same, the architecture of lines and planes, the suave black drawing, the patches, clusters and veils of atmospheric colour. But the sense of endeavour, of tension, scrutiny and indecision changes every time and makes each painting vital and restless for all its composure. Even at the end, Diebenkorn is still trying to work out another way to give us the light and space of California.

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Two art students at Western Hills High School produce their Halloween interpretation of “Monster.”

Painting by Julia Martinez, Sophomore at Western Hills High School

Painting by Stirling Crawford, Junior, Western Hills High School

Stirling speaks with his hand….Costume Day at Western Hills, with Cheech of Cheech and Chong, and an angel.

Monster Project: For High School Level Students

Create a Monster Kirstein

Objective: Design a symbolic portrait of a “monster,” using symbols to convey the monster’s inner and outer personality, affinities and tendencies. You can use collage, pencil, colored pencil, marker or paint, and you must cover your whole sheet of paper with an environment for the monster.

Your monster does not have to be realistic or look like a person, but it must include:

A monster figure, whether drawn, painted, or created with glued collage magazine pieces.

2) Use entire sheet of paper.

3) Use proportion to create a sense of the unusual and to create emphasis and balance. Create variety and harmony through the use of color, shape and value.

4) Monster needs to convery personality and the environment needs to surround it with symbols pertaining to the likes and dislikes of this monster you have created.

How to proceed:

Step 1: Draw your monster on a piece of 12” x 18” white paper to formulate and brainstorm your design. On this paper, decide how the main figure will look, and how you will arrange the objects in your drawing.

Step two: Draw main figure and symbols with pencil.

Step three: Use prisma colored pencils or regular colored pencils for the color. You may also use tempra paint, water color or magic marker. Magazine collage is also encouraged. You may also glue in words that relate to the monster.

“Clown” painted by Blaze Paul, Freshman Western Hills High School

Scale I: Focus

Project completed

Student followed directions/classroom rules

Student made effort to meet objectives and goals

Work completed on time

Effort/attitude

Scale II: Craftsmanship/Technique

Craftsmanship is aptitude, skill, manual dexterity in use of media and tools.

Technique is manner and skill with which the artist employs the tools/materials to

achieve the chosen effect.

Criteria:

Skillful use of media

Care taken with project

Work area cleaned daily

Media used with correct technique

Technical skill in the use of media

Visual detail (neatness)

Appropriate use of supplies and materials

Skillful and appropriate use of materials

Assessment:

4 Assignment on time; meets or exceeds all criteria.

3 Assignment on time with one criterion missing.

2 Assignment on time but has two criteria missing.

Assignment late or has three or four criteria missing.

Assignment late or has inappropriate solution to the problem, incomplete

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Best Field Trip Ever! Western Hills High School Art students all agreed. The trip to Josephine Sculpture Park in Frankfort, Kentucky was the best field trip they ever went on since Junior High!

Artist and owner of the Sculpture Park, Melanie Van Houten gave a moving and insightful tour to my students, encouraging art students to do what they want in their lives, to build their lives within a box without a ceiling of restrictions.

She he started her sculpture garden after receiving her Master of Fine Arts at University of Minnesota and teaching there as a professor of sculpture for six years. She then returned to her native home state and created this sculpture garden on the farm that was once her beloved grandmothers. Melanie spent many joyful years growing up on this farm and recalls many happy days enjoying the farm’s natural wonders.

Beginning from “scratch,” Melanie built her park by tirelessly writing grants, and taking small steps each year to build the beautiful park into a substantial collection of contemporary sculpture pieces from all over the country. The Park also includes a multitude of community festivals, plays, art lessons, tours, and many other community contributions throughout the year.

Josephine Sculpture Park is a tribute to the Creative Arts, to the Building of Community, and to the preservation and value of the earth. Frankfort is indeed very lucky to have such a rich cultural resource right in its very midst.

Below: A sculpture in poured iron by Melanie Van Houten made at the University of Minnesota.

The art students from Western Hills’ Fashion Design Class give a responding thanks to Melanie Van Houten for providing such an amazing resource for expanding their Fine Arts awareness! Many thanks to Melanie Van Houten!

Written by Janis Kirstein

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Dawn Smith’s Spanish class and my Visual Art class joined together for a week long unit on creating paintings influenced by Mexican Alebrijes this week at Western Hills High School in Frankfort, Kentucky. Painting and creative writing combined together for a learning experience in Social Studies, Spanish and Fashion Design.

To learn Global challenges of how to resolve conflicts, students had to work in groups and combine at least 2 animals from 2 different continents. They had to paint the animals, list their conflicts, how the animals could resolve those conflicts and capture these conflict resolutions in their choice of creative writing from poetry to dialogue to narrative writing. The writing portion was inspired by the book “Fantasy Animals” by Janis Kirstein, where a South American anteater and African lion are joined together and have to learn how to get along. This book was inspired by Mexican Alebrijes from Mexico, created with bright floral patterns in the 1930’s of conglomerations of various animals all in one being.

This Painting was inspired by Mexican Alebrijes, by Janis Kirstein in Mercedes Harn’s art class this summer. This class was for a teacher Inservice given by The Academy with the Kentucky Center for the Arts, combining the teaching of Social Studies, Visual Art and Spanish Language.